When we dumped those wood-fired stoves ...

The energy crisis made me think of how we used to live in our village - the women used firewood collected from the trees, especially the dried leaves and other matter from coconut trees, to cook food. As I grew up and the country progressed economically, the ease of getting a cooking gas connection increased and at the same time such a connection became affordable to more people. And then, people stopped using firewood - entirely. The results were immediately visible. The dried leaves and stubs from the coconut palms, and even the dried husks, suddenly had no takers. Earlier, people used to run to grab the dried coconut palm leaf or other parts that fell on the ground. Now those were left to rot on the ground. The immediate effect was the coconut groves became untidy and as soon as rain fell the decaying biomatter led to an increase in the number of millipedes and other such insects. More importantly, useful biofuels were being left to rot while the people were paying money to pay for LPG.
Of course, buring those firewoods is never a clean solution but they could easily have been turned into biogas. In fact, some people in my village were considering setting up biofuel plants when the whole thing was made irrelevant by the easy availability of cheap cooking gas.
And now, we have a problem - there is suddenly not enough of that gas and its price is climbing!
Who will we blame here? I don't know.
Maybe we should never have gone to exploiting natural gas reserves, considering the long-term and as yet unknown dangers that could create to life on earth. Does sucking out all that oil and gas make the earth prone more to earthquakes? I have heard such arguments and scientists dismiss them as baseless. But can we really say that? As more and more oil and gas is sucked out, wouldn't it create imbalances in the earth's crust? Isn't that simple logic?
And buring fossil fuels and petroleum products are adding so much of toxic substances to the air and water around, I am not sure what kind of consequences they would bring to life on earth in, say, 50 years. In fact, no one is sure.
Makes me think the simple village life that we had a couple of hundred years back was preferable to the toxic environment we have now, despite all the comforts of the modern life!

Carbon: From Life Giver To Villain

Today I was reading about how plastic bottles are good for the environment. Sounds counterintuitive? But this is about wine bottles, and the story says transporting wine in glass bottles emits more carbon and, hence, plastic bottles are a better proposition. Well, the talk now everywhere is about reducing your carbon footprint. Imagine, suddenly an element that is the building block of life on earth and a gas that has helped keep the earth's atmosphere warm enough for life on earth to flourish are being looked upon as life's worst enemies! The irony here is that however much we hate carbon and carbon dioxide, they are really needed for life to survive on this planet. The current cause of this crisis is human activity, nay, greed. And unless we learn to cut back on competitive consumption and greed I see no end to this crisis.
You can introduce more energy efficient technologies, better alternative fuels, and a lot more, but they will all serve only up to a certain extent. Human greed will soon find even the slack afforded by such technologies and fuels aren't enough - we will soon be back on square one as far as global warming is concerned.
In this context I remember what Mahatma Gandhi had said about how earth has enough resources to fulfil the needs of everyone but not enough to fulfil the greed of everyone - or words to that effect. So that is it: if we don't cut back on our greed, all our policies and emission limits will soon come to naught.
And putting limits on our greed is not something that is easy to implement. I cannot foresee our governments and leaders calling to the people on earth to limit their luxuries and greedy lifestyles. How will they, when their very survival as power wielders depend on fostering such greedy ambitions of the masses?
It will all boil down to changing our leaders, and for that we need to change our own outlook on life. So the ball is back in our court; each individual will have to take responsibility for global warming. That is a tough ask. But once it happens, I guess most of our problems will be solved as well - including that of global warming!

From gracious guests to looters and killers

I recently read somewhere in ancient India, whenever you took something from earth you said a prayer to Mother Earth that whatever you take grows back and enriches the biosphere. Just compare that with what is happening now. Human civilization has become a group of exploiters, digging ever deeper into earth to keep their greedy lifestyle going - from iron and oil to natural gas and even heat! Someone who is accustomed to the many economic theories and geological sciences will ask, what is wrong with that? The only trouble, they would argue, is that we may run out of many resources such as iron and oil, but we can either dig deeper or even spread our search to the neighbouring planets in the solar system.
The only problem with that argument is that we don't recognize earth and even the whole Universe as a living entity, which feels and reacts to changes around them. Such a shift in our viewpoint would mean a lot: for example, if we think of Earth as a living being much like us, it would follow that we are just robber barons trying to loot whatever she has. But if you advance the logic further, we could say we are staying on Mother Earth and enjoying whatever she offers us. In that case, we need to be gracious guests and not parasites. Because if we observe Nature, we can see that in most cases it is only a matter of time before an host organism gets tired of creatures in a mutualism, or symbiotic relationship, that turn parasites and kick them out.
We have turned parasites from guests, and we are plundering our host. But we forget that our host is immensely more powerful than all of us combined. If she just shakes her coat a bit violently, all of us will be no more! We are plundering on merrily as if there is no tomorrow. And we have created so-called sciences to backstop our greed. How long can this continue?
Every day, when I see the destruction around me cause in the name of development, I wonder where all this is going to end. I pray to the Himalayan masters, Divine Mother and Mother Earth to protect us from any calamities that are coming our way, and to show us the right path forward.